Although you might have many such glimpses, they usually are
not all that stable. They tend to be not only brief but subtle, and
because such glimpses are not all that graspable, self-doubt easily
creeps back in. You are pretty sure you are onto something good,
but maybe it’s too good to be true. At the same time, without your
familiar masks and credentials, you feel a bit naked and groundless.
The Path: Knowing, Accepting, Loving
We began with a sense of our potential. Something very positive
has provided our initial inspiration and gotten us started. It has
awakened our innate instinct to grow.
That positive vision has provided the ground,
but it has also shaken things up. That glimpse of
our potential has made it painfully evident how
much we have shortchanged ourselves. The way our
minds work is by opposites and contrast—good-
bad, up-down, in-out, etc.—so glimpses of whole-
someness simultaneously provide glimpses of the
opposite. They heighten our feelings of self-doubt,
confusion, and lack of genuineness. That poignant
contrast is where the real work of friendship begins.
As we practice, we uncover our layers and layers
of ideas about ourselves. We uncover memories and
hidden corners of our experience. We begin to come
up against the limits of our love and friendship for
ourselves, and for others as well. It is clear that we
habitually compartmentalize ourselves, accepting
some aspects of our experience and rejecting others.
Some parts of us are so well hidden away that we can
pretend they are not there at all.
What friendship we have at this level is quite
feeble. It relies on keeping up firewalls to prevent
what we dislike or even hate about ourselves
from creeping in. Friendship is reduced to a
matter of like and dislike.
As we see this in ourselves, we also begin to see
the limited nature of our friendship with others.
It might seem as if the way to cultivate greater
friendship with ourselves, and in turn with oth-
ers, would be to get rid of as many bad parts as
possible. What is left is acceptable and good—it is
friend-worthy. We think that if we edit out all our
unworthy parts, it will solve the problem. But the
real friendship we cultivate in meditation prac-
tice is not a matter of like or dislike, and it is not
based on getting rid of anything.
Halfhearted friendship is quite fragile. We
need to be on the defensive all the time. When
we place all sorts of conditions on what or
who is worthy of our love and friendship, our
love easily flips into disappointment—or even
hate—when those conditions are not met.
The challenge of the path of meditation is to continually
expand the bounds of our heart, the bounds of our love and
friendship. We start with ourselves. By resting simply and looking
inside, we touch in with what we actually feel about ourselves.
We come up against our fear of opening up to the whole
of our experience. We come up against our embarrassment
and feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy. We also come up
against our incredible arrogance, which is another manifesta-
tion of our fear. And by taking an honest look at the kinds of
thoughts and feelings we have, we learn a lot about the limits
we place on our friendship with others.
SHAMBHALA SUN NOVEMBER 2015
50